


you know that you had it once (and you know that you want it back)

by mortarsmayfall



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Porn with Feelings, Post-PRU, Trauma, VERY VAGUE PORN, not implied more like newt considering damaging his brain to keep the precursors out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-24 21:58:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14364546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mortarsmayfall/pseuds/mortarsmayfall
Summary: When it’s all over, they find each other.





	you know that you had it once (and you know that you want it back)

When it’s all over, they find each other.

They keep Newt locked in solitary for two weeks where he thrashes and groans at the withdrawals, the loss of Alice, as the precursors recede into ghost drift, weak echoes in the hollow chamber of his skull. Cutting those strings was not painless, not when the cords are made of the puppet’s own brain matter, man, not when Newt’s pretty sure there’s nothing left of _him_ rattling around in his head but scar tissue over scar tissue. 

When the abused inner membrane of his nose calls it quits on him _again,_ thanks, body, he plugs the offending nostril with a handkerchief he doesn’t remember buying, and wonders when he stopped using his shirtsleeve.

\--

Newton returns to him haunted. Like he’d seen a ghost, and he’s unshaven and miserable-looking but it doesn’t stop Hermann from dropping his cane and colliding into him, a mast in a maelstrom. 

They cry. Of course they do. Newton sniffles and Hermann realizes he’s being bled on but it doesn’t matter, it _doesn’t matter,_ he would ruin all of his best shirts gladly if it meant Newton was there to stay.

\--

In a fit of rage, Newt cuts his hair.

Everything about the last ten years terrifies and enrages him. He throws that ring (gaudy, even for his own questionable mid-aughts Hot Topic sensibilities) to the ground and grinds it practically to hundred-dollar dust under his boot. He throws all of his new clothes (thousands upon thousands of dollars of it, acquired with what he can only call blood money) in the Shatterdome incinerator, watches the flames lick high over the expensive silks and linens. And he cuts his hair, one day, snapping at it wildly with a pair of safety scissors until his face crumples and he’s crying, God damn it _why is he crying_ you have no right to cry, asshole. And he sits there in Hermann’s seated shower choking on his tears and his anger and his panic, and he keeps crying until Hermann eases the scissors from his manic-rigid fingers and clips his hair himself.

_Snip, snip._ Newt twitches and wraps his fingers around the hand Hermann uses to keep his head still, cradling his jaw like something shiny and new, fragile-shelled and defenseless.

_Snip, snip._ Hermann would never admit it, but he has the old, boyish trim of Newt’s hair memorized, replicates it faithfully (or as best he can) with a dull old pair of household scissors. How he used to hate that haircut _Doctor Geiszler it would behoove you to present yourself as the age you are_ now _not the pomade-soaked catastrophe I knew when we were twenty-four._

_Snip, snip._ If Newt thanks him, Hermann doesn’t say anything back. It’s understood.

\--

Ten years is a long while to wait.

Oh, he had tried to move on but there was no one for him like there was Newton, Newton whose body and mind slotted together with his perfectly, two supplementary angles. Newton who laughed and laughed and raked nails down his back when Hermann pressed him into the mattress, Newton who curled fingers in his freshly-shaven undercut just to see him gasp, Newton who was too loud, too brash, shrieked filthy things at Hermann both in and out of bed.

And even when the emails crawled to a halt and Hermann saw him more often on television than in person he still held on to that hope, that tiny little sliver of it, that he’d see him again someday, that after bedding him countless times he’d be able to tell him what he’d been too proud, too emotionally constipated, in all honesty too afraid to say – _I love you, after everything, since that very first time I got your letter back that said_ you have some interesting theories, here’s how I think they’re all wrong.

Foolish?

Perhaps.

But God knows the foolishness doesn’t come from Hermann’s side of the drift.

\--

Ten years is a long time to wait, and Newt realizes that in the Shatterdome elevator when his hand finds Hermann’s, crawls up his shirtsleeve to caress the delicate skin of his wrist, and the other man shudders.

“Hermann,” Newt says, uncharacteristically soft. He’s afraid, fucking pants-shitting _terrified_ to be perfectly, miserably honest, afraid he’s fucked it all, lost it to trying, whatever, afraid to say anything more because his uncontrolled emotions _will_ spill out, through his mouth, his eyes, his ears. 

Hermann looks at him like something broken, a shard of lapis lazuli, ragged at the edges and run through with more imperfections than any reasonable person could shake a stick at but brilliant, dazzling blue, the color of the anteverse, the drift, kaiju blue.

He kisses Newt there, in the elevator, presses him against the far side so their bodies line up chest-to-chest and the contact is like nothing else, it’s fire and it’s drowning and when Hermann slots his fingers between Newt’s own it feels like the most logical thing in the world, like middle-school math, like _y = mx + b,_ you fuckin’ moron.

\--

They go to bed with the lights off, at Newton’s request, darkness obscuring the tattoos slithering across his bare skin. 

Newton touches him, just slides his hands across Hermann’s arms, his sides, the tops of his thighs, and Hermann says “oh,” and pulls him close, naked and vulnerable. Newton is ugly and weird and beautiful and unique and Hermann thinks that as Newton comes apart under his touch with a soft noise, as if the Precursors had stolen his voice from him as well.

Later, when Newton gets a hand around him he sighs and shakes and gasps, and when Hermann comes he presses his forehead against Newton’s, a kiss of sorts, and wonders if ancient man had it right. That if he were to trepan a hole right between his eyes and hook his brain into Newton’s, the voices crawling in the deep dark corners of his skull would quiet.

Oh, to share a neural load.

“I missed you,” Hermann whispers, in the too-still blue-black of the apartment bedroom. _I love you, I always have,_ is what he prays Newton understands, as if he could physically shove the thought into Newton’s skull cavity.

Ten years is a long while to wait, and in those ten years Hermann cut himself open slowly and carefully, lovingly, so his ribs became a gift box offering up his battered, bleeding heart.

He would let Newton have it, if only he would ask.

\--

Normal life.

Ha. What, pray tell, constitutes as _normal_ these days, when your brain is a mass of trauma and scarring and links left to rot, _needed_ to rot, if the Precursors came back for him he’d self-administer a fucking lobotomy for all he cared, see how you like it when your little genius human’s frontal lobe is separated from the rest of his _fucking_ brain. What’s normal when your body feels too large and too small, like there should be more of you in it, like you have the ghost of a feeling you were built much larger to level skylines?

So long to this wretched form, indeed.

Normal life is security clearance at the PPDC, odd looks from J-Techs who only know Newt from television, who want to rip his head off – understandably. Normal life is Mako wrapping her good arm around Newt when Hermann shuffles him back into the lab and telling him it’s good to see him again, as if he isn’t the direct cause of the scarring all over the left side of her body. Normal life is the cadets darting around him, smiling but wary.

Normal life is trying to find some semblance of normal life.

“I don’t wanna think right now,” Newt says to Hermann, one day, belt wrapped tightly around his fist, thrust up in an offering to Hermann. “Help me?”

And Hermann does. He loops it around Newt’s wrists and through the headboard and kisses him hard before taking him as roughly as his bad leg will allow. When he comes it’s gorgeously silent in his head for once in weeks and Newt fucking cries despite everything and Hermann blessedly doesn’t say anything about it, just silently kisses the tears off his face as he unbuckles the belt, then moves to kiss Newt’s chafed wrists.

“Would you marry me,” Newt says, before he can stop himself. Then, “I mean – I, what I mean to say is, I think I love you, dude, and I’d be thrilled if you’d stay with me forever and ever and make sure I don’t do something stupid like stroke out drifting with a kaiju brain?”

Hermann stares at him. His eyelashes cast long, dark shadows over the circles under his eyes.

“If not, that’s cool too,” Newt finishes, lamely.

“Newton,” Hermann says, slowly. “I would marry you on every blasted continent, including Antarctica, if you insisted.”

“Oh, rad,” Newt croaks, cut off quickly when Hermann pulls him into another kiss.

\--

Normal life.

Normal life begins when Hermann slips the ring on the exact same finger that used to be heavy with that silly old Elvis ring. Normal life begins when Newton rocks up on tiptoes and kisses him and what seems like the whole Shatterdome cheers. Normal life begins when Newton pulls him on top and they go for hours that night until Hermann is very sure his leg will hate him for days after but he can’t seem to care because Newton is under him, around him, on his tongue. Because Newton’s fingers slot between his and Hermann thinks _yes, finally,_ finally.

Normal life begins when Hermann says _I love you, darling,_ and Newton smiles, tired and sad and brilliant, brighter than any star in the night sky.

**Author's Note:**

> fellas....i'm sad about them.
> 
> title from [crack baby](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edEO9Ldb_VQ) by mitski. the full lyric i had in mind is "crack baby, you don't know what you want / but you know that you had it once / and you know that you want it back."


End file.
